Suggestions for project organization/management?

I don't go a day without thinking about my game project -- which started out as a hopeful HOTOHR entry, didn't get near close to being playable before the end of 2014; in the meantime it grew much bigger in scope in terms of game design elements even as I reduced the gameworld size.

But the past few months I've been absolutely awful at working on it regularly, and it's only getting worse. I don't have anything even remotely close to a schedule that I keep anymore. And quite frankly, the lack of progress is making me very depressed, the game is still in a hacky pre-alpha state after all these months.

But depression isn't something I just cave into anymore. So I'm going to figure out a way to keep my work in CUSTOM more structured and regular, not "open CUSTOM, flick through submenus and try to think of what I feel like I might be up to working on before I get distracted".

What I think I need is a way to make short term tasks that I can knock out. Like say, turn one concept sketch into an 8 frame NPC set within 2~3 hours, or draw a few outdoor tiles or interior furniture tiles in 1~2 hours.

A friend suggested Trello and I'm giving it a try. I'm not sure if it's that good for keeping organization in a one-person project, though I could be wrong. It does seem more geared toward collaborative projects.

If anyone has recommendations for keeping regular work on a project organized and structured, PLEASE let me know. I'm not giving up, but I am starting to feel desperate. This project has gone from just-some-game-I-could-probably-pull-off to something I have lots of well developed ideas for, and I legitimately care about seeing it to fruition now. I just gotta make a breakthrough somehow so I get more motivated to keep going.

Since I have many similar issues when it comes to organization, I'm not sure how much help I would be able to give on how to do it. That being said, creating a schedule with short and long term goals is a big help. I actually just watched a video about this by Extra Credits. It may or may not have useful advice, but advice nonetheless, from people who have had a lot of experience making games.

Don't get depressed over it, it's not worth it. If you're not feeling like you have anything to do, try to get some inspiration, however you usually do that. I usually find my inspiration late at night when I start thinking about stuff and suddenly my motivation skyrockets and I just have a million new ideas, so I try to focus that energy to create some goals that I can get done later for when the inspiration is gone. So then when you don't have that divine motivation, you still have some little things in the game that you can easily pump out just to get something accomplished.

I hope this was somewhat helpful. I feel like I might have repeated some stuff in there, I'm about to pass out. But don't lose motivation. You can do it, I know you can. [/url]

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My pronouns are they/them
Ps. I love my wife

Thanks for the response. The video had a lot of points that I don't necessarily agree with (e.g. an RPG of decent quality and depth does not take 1-3 months to make, under any circumstances) but some that were helpful, like the importance of milestones.

I do need to establish milestones and be better at taking inventory of things I've accomplished so far and the few things I plan on accomplishing next. I'm going to try to figure out a way to organize that on Trello.

your userpic is the best thing ever

Different things work for different people, but typically (and for me), a strong design doc will lay out everything you need to do, and takes away the uncertainty of the little tasks. Also keeps the big picture in mind, which is great motivation for finishing larger projects.

Open word or whatever, and go at it. Outline the sections, the scenes, write out the text to be used in game. Detail what you want to accomplish with the graphics, battles, map design, theme, whatever is important to you. It will be much more productive than feeling like you have to open custom to get anywhere.

I usually put at the top "One sentence summary" and it's usually blank for a long time cause it's hard but important to get there. Under it, "Overview" or "Summary" and get those ideas in writing. Rework kills productivity.

This is tangential to what you talked about, but... Projects always grow in scope as time goes on. That's one reason to start with a plan for a small game. If a project keeps growing then you'll never finish it. Having lots of ideas allows you to pick the best ones and cut the rest, don't try to put everything in.

Tasks which are 2 hours long may still be much too big. For most people, the hardest part is starting. If there's a task you can do in a few minutes then it becomes easy to spontaneously start on it and then go on to do something else.

Actually, taking 2-3 hours to create a single walkabout set sounds too long anyway. Yes, if I were to fiddle with a walkabout set until I gave up on being able to improve it any further it would probably take that long. But you shouldn't aim for perfection, or you'll never finish. (Besides, research suggests that you improve much faster by producing a larger volume of work rather than by aiming for perfection.) And the more you get done, the more satisfaction and fun you'll get out of it, and the more time you'll put into it. Use temporary graphics to mock things up so that you can see what the end product will be, can make adjustments to your plans earlier, and get a better sense of gradual progress rather than having to wait for things to come together, thus hopefully gaining motivation to finish.

Thanks for the replies guys. It does help and mean a lot.

Reading the replies, too, I'm realizing that one thing I'm not doing is allowing myself to freely make things that kind of suck but can be improved upon. I really want to make a game that's high quality and polished WHEN it's finished, but I'm slowing down my productivity by not accepting something as "decent enough for now" and moving on, I get stuck on things and want to keep tweaking and improving them. This is a bad tendency of mine that's plagued me for years.

I think I'm going to do some simple mockups of maptiles sometime in the next week and just establish flat color schemes.